PowerColor's Radeon XT 5700 XT Red Devil is the company's flagship design for the Radeon RX 5700 XT. It is built around a slightly redesigned PCB and a much better cooler and is overclocked out of the box. Thanks to the factory overclock, the card achieves a 2% performance improvement over the AMD reference design, which is barely worth mentioning. At 1440p, AMD's Radeon VII flagship is only 5% faster than the Red Devil, and the RTX 2070 Super is 8% ahead. Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070, the PowerColor card delivers 4% higher FPS. NVIDIA's recently released RTX 2060 Super is 8% behind, and the difference to the RX 5700 is 14%. This effectively positions the PowerColor Red Devil right between the NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super. With these performance results, we can definitely recommend the RX 5700 XT for maximum details gaming at 1440p resolution, or high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p.

PowerColor's new cooler is a huge triple-slot, triple-fan monster that strikes an excellent balance between temperatures and noise levels, probably with a slight tendency towards lower noise, which is good as one or two °C less won't make a difference with regular usage. However, you will be exposed to noise levels all the time. That said, with 74°C in heavy gaming, temperatures are among the lowest of all RX 5700 XT cards we've reviewed so far. Only the MSI Evoke runs cooler, but it does so with much more noise. Compared to the AMD reference design, this is a whopping 18°C temperature improvement. Noise levels are excellent, too, reaching only 31 dBA, which makes it the quietest RX 5700 XT card we've tested so far. But wait, there's more. PowerColor has added a dual-BIOS feature on their card, with the second BIOS labeled "silent". When I first saw this I thought "silent"? Yeah, maybe don't overdo it and just call it "quiet". Guess, I was wrong. The silent BIOS really is silent at even full load. Measurements show that setting to run at only 29 dBA, which is a new record for AMD Radeon cards in TPU reviews. It's also just 1 dBA shy of the lowest noise levels we ever recorded for a high-end graphics card (MSI RTX 2070S Gaming X Trio @ 28 dBA). Very, very impressive, PowerColor! They achieved this feat by severely optimizing the silent BIOS for lower heat output. In that mode, the card will run clocks that are a few precent lower, and at a lower voltage, which reduces the heat generated by the graphics processor and allows the cooler to run slower without increasing temperatures too much. We measured 79°C, a 5°C increase over the default BIOS—definitely worth it if you want low noise option. The almost mandatory idle-fan-stop capability is included with both BIOSes, too.

Gaming power consumption is increased a bit over what we've seen from the AMD reference, but not by much. The driving factors here are the higher power limit, higher clock speeds, and VRM changes—the first two contribute positively to performance, which definitely makes it worth it, I'd say. With roughly 265 W, power draw is a bit higher than on competing NVIDIA cards, but the differences are not huge, so PSU choices aren't affected at all.

Overclocking our sample was slightly easier than on the AMD reference design. Especially memory overclocking worked correctly now. Perhaps that's because PowerColor uses Micron instead of Samsung chips like the reference design. On NVIDIA, we see significantly better overclocking from Samsung than from Micron—here, it's reversed. Memory overclocking is held back by the slider adjustment range in Wattman, which only goes up to 1900 MHz. We've encountered this obstacle in the past with AMD, so let's hope they reconsider putting artificial OC limits into their driver. GPU overclocking yielded slightly lower clocks than on our AMD card, but with 15 MHz, the difference seems to be due to the silicon lottery. After manual overclocking, we achieved a 1.5% real-life performance gain. It's interesting to see that in the end, all cards we tested so far end up with almost identical maximum performance as the spread is only around 2%.

On the topic of raytracing, I'm sure you've already made up your mind whether it's something you're interested in or not, but I don't doubt for a second that NVIDIA, with their excellent developer relations, is pushing the technology very hard, and it looks like the adoption rate is improving. We're also hearing rumors that next-gen consoles will feature some sort of raytracing technology, too. I'd say, it's not a big deal for the near future, but it could become relevant in the years to come, so if you're future-proofing for many years to come, it could be a factor. My recommendation is not to worry about the future too much and look at what you need today to buy a new card when you need it, selling the old one to offset the cost.

PowerColor's Radeon RX 5700 XT Red Devil is expected to retail for $440. We reviewed the $450 Limited Edition, which has a flashier package and bundles an RGB mousepad and a graphics card holder. PowerColor assures us that the Limited Edition just has the bigger bundle—the card, all its specs, clocks, etc., will be identical on the regular $440 edition. At that price, the card is not unreasonably priced, I'd say maybe $10 too high. Its 2% out-of-the-box performance increase over reference is good for a $10 price increase; add the bigger cooler with lower noise and temperatures for maybe $15. Personally, I would be willing to pay another premium for the super-low noise output, which is probably what PowerColor is betting on, and rightfully so. If noise isn't your primary concern, then the Sapphire RX 5700 XT Pulse for $410 is very strong competition. It looks like PowerColor's Red Devil will set constraints on pricing for super-high-end custom designs like the ASUS STRIX, Sapphire Nitro, and MSI Gaming X because those will have a hard time offering more to justify a higher price. Other options in this segment are custom-design RTX 2060 Super cards, which are a bit slower, but more energy efficient. If you are willing to spend more money, the $500 RTX 2070 Super could be an option, too. Looks like the battle in the $400–$500 segment is getting interesting, which will definitely benefit us customers because prices will go down and good engineering gets rewarded.